Universe Has Finite Lifespan, Higgs Boson Calculations Suggest

Current speculation is that the universe will keep expanding untill it's so thin, it just peters out. (and I liked this better than the old big crunch idea.

Now we have this one

www.huffingtonpost.com...

reply to post by Peter Brake


Seems to me that if this is so, then our current universe also in turn would have bubbled up in the middle of the last universe. Has anybody seen anysign of an old universe around the place?

Seriously can anybody explain how they get to this conclusion? - no maths please

reply to post by Peter Brake


Well this makes sense because of the great attractor. There is no sign of the thing slowing down, and many proofs that it's speeding up, so it will be too thin to fall back in on itself by those calculations alone (I'm not good at maths, it just seems logical). Thanks for the data, I'll check out further articles on this.

reply to post by Peter Brake
The story was on BBC earlier today and was pretty interesting. Either way we cut it, this beautiful universe we all live in will come to an end one day. It used to be argued that an expanding universe would eventually run out of energy and become dead (entropy). Imagine space with the stars and galaxies so far apart that there was no light?

In this newer scenario, the idea is that all matter would be extinguished and replaced by a new universe.

"If you use all the physics we know now, and you do this straightforward calculation - it's bad news. "What happens is you get just a quantum fluctuation that makes a tiny bubble of the vacuum the Universe really wants to be in. And because it's a lower-energy state, this bubble will then expand, basically at the speed of light, and sweep everything before it," the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory theoretician told BBC News.

BBC article

What do they mean with "lifespan".

Since the universe is - at least at the current stage of research - not a living organism, it has no life to begin with.

And since "universe" is simply a term for describing whatever matter or energy is present all in all, it can never cease to exist, even if it all disintegrates into subatomic particles at some point, it will still represent the universe.

I wonder how many million tax dollars were spent on this ingenious study.

I don't think knowing what they consider the life expectancy of the universe is worth knowing myself. It is just another persons guess. Whatever the universe decides to do with itself is alright with me. I'm more concerned about keeping my reality from collapsing within my lifetime. I try to keep perspective in mind with my thinking. Maybe that scientist should consider spending his time on something like keeping our energy levels at proper levels to maintain health and sanity. Might be a little boring but much more pertinent to our existence on this little rock in space..

reply to post by Kandinsky


"What happens is you get just a quantum fluctuation that makes a tiny bubble of the vacuum the Universe really wants to be in. And because it's a lower-energy state, this bubble will then expand, basically at the speed of light, and sweep everything before it,"

Ok, so the last universe, was in the same "space" that the current universe is in now, but instead on a big bang there was a tiny bubble made up from the vacuum left by the dispersal of the last universe. Anybody else struggling with this?

I like the idea of a cyclical universe – it seems to fit with nature, and the Veda’s , do you think that the universe grows bigger than the last with each cycle? Are we already beyond the size of the last universe? Is this why we see no evidence of the previous one?

reply to post by Peter Brake


I don't know. All I know is that all of this has happened before. And all will happen again.

reply to post by jayron


There was a news item a year or two back talking about a galaxy that was older then the universe, can't verify it's "truth” (never been down that far - and age is so subjective Anyway could be part of the last one, where the rulers of the last universe retired to (protected) until the birth of this new universe.

Could be an interesting place, might teach us a thing or two. Like explaining where or the energy comes from that can make a tiny bubble expand into the size of a universe. Sounds more likely that it is the other side of a huge black hole which spits out all the “matter” from the last universe either in a big bang or a continuous stream.

I take this claim with a large pinch of salt because the question of stability of the ground state of the Higgs field is sensitive to the values of the constants used in the Standard Model and we do not yet know the Higgs boson's mass accurately enough to make safe predictions about the fate of the Universe. Not only that, different measurements of the gravitational constant fluctuate within a few percentage points, meaning that we may not have accurate enough values of this and other constants to predict with certainty that a lower state of the Higgs field exists. Also, there are recent indications from CERN (see here) that several scalar doublets may exist for the Higgs field, in which case instability of the vacuum may be in principle avoided. Besides, every good theoretical physicist knows that the Standard Model, in whose context these calculations have been made, has to be wrong! In fact, I KNOW that it is wrong. I proved it in several published books decades ago, but the proof was ignored because it conflicted with the Standard Model, which was a big no no then. I predict that quarks are not fundamental but composed of three spin-1/2 preons. There WILL be another revolution in particle physics in a few years. Hopefully, the upgraded LHC will uncover the necessary experimental signatures for quark compositeness. Until then all bets about the fate of the universe are still off, as far as I am concerned, as you cannot trust calculations made with a faulty theory.

reply to post by micpsi


I'm sure many more surprises will arrive along the way of our understanding; my question (and boggling of the mind) is that I need to assume that space (the area that the universe has currently expanded over) would be irrelevant to the Higgs Boson for it to be able to gather the energy to be “born again” in the dispersed remains of the old universe.
In away I like the idea, it’s a bit spooky but am I making a wrong assumption? What are the properties of the Higgs Boson which would make them suggest such a thing?